My argument was that in addition to the peering settlement charges, each network would charge their customers for the traffic they generate. So, if you ask your web hosting customers to add traffic, and actually pay them for that, then my customers that request content from yours get a bigger bill than they used to. My customers stop going to your customers site. (I'll provide them with an itemized bill that lets them see what cost so much and why.)
Alex@netaxs.com wrote:
This is nice. Do you have any idea what kind of backend software would you need to be able to process that much data in real-time?
Netflow seems to scale up to DS-3 levels with no problems, and, in fact, I haven't seen too many problems with it on OC-3's either... Now, the UDP export to the receiver could cause some issues. But with 400MHZ processors becoming common-place, I don't think its that difficult to do.
I'm not saying the technology is there today, but is there any doubt it won't be tomorrow?
Remember, you will be tracking sessions for lets say a period of 30 days. During that time as a backbone provider you would have to somehow make sure that you do not bill anyone twice, do not skip a site and do not add another one. What are you going to do about people that hit the sites via proxies or web-caches or NAT boxes? Also, I am not able to get the reference of the top of my head but I remember reading that no matter how large or how small the amount is, it costs about $3.00 to bill 1 account accounting time and materials. It is very hard to imagine that someone would like to spend $3.00x N mm every month on just billing. Alex